Isilee Tisslar (finished)

[Lisenet]

Name: Isilee Tisslar
Age: twenty-six
Race: human
Allegiance: myself and my kids, if only they knew me well enough to trust me

Physical Description: My husband likes me to wear the very finest, softest silks and brocades in the country, and is always buying me new things, though they are entirely for his own enjoyment. He likes me in mostly pale colors because I have dark eyes and dark, smooth and straight hair I can sit on when it isn’t styled. My husband prefers it styled, though, so rarely do I get to see it down. There are several strands of gray hidden under a layer of black on my right side--I suppose it's true that your hair does change color if you've taken a hard strike to the head. It takes more work to keep my hair smooth now than it did when I was younger. I suppose I’m young still, but most days I feel so old. It takes well-placed bee stings to ripen my lips, white marble ground into my teeth to whiten them, soaks in the harshest wines to soften my skin and vinegar washes to tighten it. The maintenance it takes to try to look as perfect as I did when I was fifteen is incredible. It requires hours out of every day, and I swear it makes me older than anything he ever could. I haven’t felt well, or whole, in years.

Personality: I’m not even sure I remember who I used to be before. I always got along with my father, his wife and their legitimate children. I even helped to take care of them. When the maids or their mother can’t get them to stop crying or start trying I always can. Or could. But now I live day to day, or hour to hour when I’m struggling. I’ve learned how to make one day feel like a matter of hours, though, and I can pass a number of weeks in a cool drift of emotional snow if I try. These weeks are usually very productive when I have something to occupy myself with. If I don’t I just sit at the window. Unless my husband has guests, and then I must stay out of sight.

There are few people I trust these days, for the most part because I simply can't. I am kept isolated as much as possible because my husband cannot bear the thought of anybody enjoying my presence but him. The touch of others who are not him is always light, fleeting and cold. I suppose somewhere deep inside I long for genuine companionship as I once had, but I fear the wanting of things I cannot have. I am afraid that wanting something will only make it harder to attain.

As far as enjoyment goes however....I take what I can scavenge from my daily life and the lives of others. Two pigeons squabbling on the windowsill will make me smile if nobody is looking, or if I catch a strain of song. If I find that I appreciate somebody else's hard work I will do what I can to accommodate them, make their work less complicated. I pick up after myself so the maids don't have to do it and so I have something to do. I never make a fuss about how they run things, as I know other women do. If I dislike you, however, I will do all I can to hinder you. I put ice in the bottom of my husband's hot soup if it passes through my hands on its way to him. When no one is looking I work away the stitches in his fine shoes so they will come loose. These tiny, anonymous rebellings are all that I can risk, but still they help me keep my sanity.

If you pass me on the street, though, if you want to better understand the mystery of the woman under the veil, don't try to befriend me. His guards who follow my every breath when I am permitted outside the keep report to him the number of words passed between me and every other person I interact with. If he believes you were disrespectful you will disappear. If he believes you like me too much you will disappear too.


History: I was born to my unwed, foreign-born mother a year after my father fell in love with her. His ship home had washed ashore in pieces, and she had fished him out while netting out shrimp. My father had been knocked about and terribly dehydrated, and in the week she brought him back to life, as he was trying not to remember who he was and that his future was not his to give, he fell in love with her. Even after he remembered he locked it down for as long as possible so he could spend as much time pretending as possible.

Eventually someone saw him who recognized him, but by then it was clear that if the noble father left, all of him wouldn’t leave. So, having been raised to do the right thing by those he wished he’d never wronged, he brought her with him, to the noble house that treated her as respectfully as they could, and where they turned up the sheets to wrap her in when she died in childbirth.

My father raised me the same way he raised his legitimate children, when five years later he was married and had some of his own. He even managed to fall in love with a woman who found it in her heart to love me too. It probably helped that my mother hadn’t lasted long enough to compete with her, but I didn’t mind why my father’s wife could love me, only that she did. And living like that, the elder daughter who would inherit only enough for her to live contentedly until I married, I was happy.

That was until the nearby duke decided that his land wasn’t wide enough, though, or prosperous enough. My father’s fields never lay fallow, the wells were never dry or sour, and his people preferred enterprise to fighting with each other. And the duke wanted it. So he reached out with an iron-spiked fist and took half of it, squeezing and shaking, before pausing just long enough to demand the rest of it before he dented his silver helm. Her father gave it, but not before the duke saw half of my face peeking out from behind a shuttered window, and declared that he wanted me too. And then he threatened to give up their entire deal until I came with him.

I never considered myself a terribly courageous person. I cried when my father made me go. I clung, my half-siblings crying too, and even my step-mother shaking and pale, to my father, and he pried my hands from his arms. I readily knew that I had to go, as did we all, but I couldn’t make myself let go of what I loved for a life I knew I would hate. Eventually the duke tired of my antics and removed my hands so my father wouldn’t have to do it himself, and took me away.

As the duke does like his presentation, loves the drama he creates, and apparently loved the exotic casts to my mother’s features in my face, the last time I was seen for more than seconds in public without a veil was when he drew my wedding veil back over my hair. In the last eleven years I have borne him six children: a daughter, three sons, another daughter and another son, as well as three mixed in who either didn’t make it to term or died in my arms, if they’d gotten big enough. One fell from my womb dead and was so tiny I could hold her in one hand, though not easily, my hands shook so violently. After I lost the first I screamed at him never to touch me again, and for that disobedience he ordered my servants to boil small stones, me to lay on my belly, and the servants to line the bottoms of my feet with the scorching stones. It is a common occurrence, though I usually can follow my better judgment these days.

The duke has spread the story that his lovely exotic wife is frail with recursive illness, and I must follow the ploy. He is terribly jealous, and possessive, and is determined that no other man should look upon my face for more than moments, if he can help it. The men of lower status he cares less about, but those closer irk him more. He is frightened they will take me away. The few days a year I am permitted out of his keep I must wear a thick veil that nearly blinds me, and I am always accompanied by at least two servants who are utterly loyal to him for some reason or another, if not more. My own servants are rotated so frequently I barely have time to learn their names before they’re gone again. My lord does not want anybody to ever know me well enough to care about me. I see my children maybe once a month up close, and always supervised. We are alien creatures to each other.

At this point, I have become an alien creature to myself. I sit in windows, I embroider the finest lace in the country, and I write on sheets I burn the second the ink dries. This is all I have, with my brief glimpses of my children, that I am permitted to keep me sane. Though if my husband knew about my writing, even if it never leaves my hands, I am sure the bruises my rotating maids know well how to hide would quickly become something more difficult to ignore. We all know how difficult it is to wash blood out of silk. Silk is already made from death—it does not react well to being spilt upon with the waters of the living.

But I do my best not to think about these things, or the future. Instead I think about the present. And I teach myself anything I feel the whim to learn. Lace-making, the finest embroidering, singing, and nearly any instrument you out into my hands. And I write whenever I am permitted or forced to be alone. Learning does me well. Better than anything else that tends to happen.


Roleplaying Sample: n/a

I'm in here, can anybody see me?
Can anybody help?

I'm in here, a prisoner of history,
Can anybody help?

I'm in here, I'm trying to tell you something,
Can anybody help?

I'm in here, I'm calling out but you can't hear,
Can anybody help?

[Kite]

Accepted!